November 26, 2008

Equality: The Elusive Ideal

[Address to the H.L. Mencken Club Annual Meeting; November 21-23,
2008]

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My study at home in Long Island has bookshelves on all four walls. When I originally stocked those shelves, I
worked out a system for doing
so. The shelves on the north wall, directly behind me as I sit at my desk, are all reference books. I am a great fan
of reference books, and find
that they have by no means been made redundant by internet services like Wikipedia and the Google search engine, as
some people say.

Then at the northeast corner of the study, at eight o'clock from me as I sit at my desk, are math books. As all
good Aristotelians know,
math is supposed to be the one subject whose propositions are indisputably certain. The angles of a plane triangle
will add up to two right angles,
now and forever, here or in the Great Galaxy M31 in Andromeda.

From math, the most indisputable type of knowledge, I then go clockwise round the study to the most disputable.
So proceeding along that
east wall from the math books are books on the sciences, with the so-called "hard" sciences —
physics, astronomy, computer
science — at the northern end, shading off into biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology,
religion — a branch of
anthropology so far as I am concerned — economics, and linguistics.

Continuing clockwise round my study walls, the south wall is all history, advancing (or retreating, depending on
your point of view) to
political science and plain politics in the southwest corner — continuing, you see, the descent from the
pure certainty of math to topics
softer and fuzzier.

Turning that southwest corner and now coming up the west wall, there I have my small collection of military
books, my even smaller collection
of philosophy books and courses — I mean, Teaching
Company courses, as I find philosophy hard to digest off the printed
page — and a lot of current-affairs opinionating by authors like Pat Buchanan and Laura Ingraham.

There is then a block of shelves given over to biography. Looking at them, I'm mildly surprised at how many
biographies I have —
a good half of them reviewed for someone or other. These tail off into books of diaries and letters, and some essays
and belle-lettres.
Having pretty much exhausted the world of fact, the remaining fifty feet or so of shelving are taken up by fiction,
then poetry, and finally music,
these being the least fixed of literary realms, the anti-math.

In any scheme like this, as a librarian will tell you, there are problems of classification. Should E. Royston
Pike's book Britain's
Prime Ministers from Walpole to Wilson be shelved in politics, or in history? Does a biography of Carl Friedrich
Gauss belong among the
biographies, or on the other side of the study among the math books? Never having made friends with the Dewey Decimal
System, I resolve these knotty
issues by whim, placing troublesome books according to my own estimation of how long it will take me to find them.
This doesn't work very well, as
whatever algorithm I apply when shelving the book, I've completely forgotten six months later when I need the darn
thing.

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Recently a new class of books has started to come up that presents classification issues of this kind. The
first was John Entine's 2007 book
Abraham's
Children, which I reviewed for VDARE. Then
came
Michael Hart's book
Understanding
Human History. The first of those books is a history of the Jews, but informed by genetics. Because the Jews
have been keeping pretty much
to themselves for three thousand years, and writing down everything that happens to them, they form an ideal group for
the study of inherited traits.
The second, Michael Hart's book, was more ambitious, attempting a history of the entire human race informed by
genetics, and offering genetic
explanation for problems like: why are conquests of southern people by northern people much more common than vice
versa?

What are these books? How do I classify them? Are they history, or biology? I'm starting to think of
them to myself as
biohistory.

The issue got acute last week when Basic Books asked me for a blurb note on a book they will be publishing soon.
The book's title is
The 10,000 Year Explosion. The co-authors are Gregory Cochran
and Henry Harpending, names
that I am sure will be known to some of those here today.
I read the book at one sitting and fired off an adulatory blurb note with totally uncharacteristic speed and
efficiency. It's a very fine book, and
I urge you to get a copy when it comes out. I can't go into much detail about it, as it is very bad manners
to publish a review of a book
before the book is formally published. I'll just describe the book's theme in outline, and hope to make up for this
slight trangression of etiquette
by urging you to keep an eye open for the book and buying a copy when it does come out (in February, I think).

The 10,000 Year Explosion is yet another example of biohistory — history informed by
genetics. It leans hard on the
fact — and it indisputably is a fact, as the authors amply demonstrate — that not only
is evolutionary change going
on among human beings, it has been speeding up across human history, and is probably still accelerating right now.

In the present intellectual climate — outside the human sciences, I mean — this is a very
shocking thing to say. State
dogma in the Western World, clung to very tenaciously by our academic elites — again, outside the
human-science departments —
as well as by our media and political elites, says the opposite thing — and doesn't merely
say that opposite thing, but
demands assent, and casts into outer darkness all who resist.

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There is now not much disagreement that a small group — likely just a few hundred, perhaps less than
two hundred — of
our species, homo sapiens, left its home in eastern Africa 50 or 60 thousand years ago, and thereafter
gradually spread across the whole
world. There were other species of hominid in the world at the time, lineages that had separated from ours hundreds of
thousands of years before.
These other species — the Neanderthals are the ones everyone knows about — became extinct, and
homo sap.
populated the world, though of course the process was very gradual, spread over tens of thousands of years.

The aforementioned state dogma asserts the following thing: That evolutionary change in our species
ceased when that small group
emerged from Africa fifty thousand years ago. There has been no further evolutionary change since that date. Observed
difference in human beings
and human groups are due to something called "culture." They have nothing whatever to do with
biology — and when I say
"biology," I include genetics as a sub-science there.

The reason why this dogma has such a grip on our non-scientific elites, and indeed even on some of the
scientific ones, is that it preserves
the "psychic unity of mankind." This phrase, the "psychic unity of mankind," was coined by a
19th-century German
anthropologist, Adolf Bastian (though of course he coined it in German — die psychische Einheit des
Menschen) and was then taken
up
enthusiastically by another German anthropologist of the following generation,
Franz Boas. In
1887 Boas emigrated to the United States, and became the most influential American anthropologist of the early
twentieth century.

This idea of the "psychic unity of mankind" is a sort of blank slate principle. It says that all
human beings everywhere have the
same physiological nature, most especially the same brains, and that all observed differences, both group and
individual, are the result of
"culture" acting on this infinitely plastic substratum — writing words on this "blank
slate."

"Blank slate" is in fact sometimes used as an identifier for this point of view — this
belief in the psychic unity of
mankind. It is also sometimes called a "Boasian" viewpoint in honor of Franz Boas — poor Bastian
seems to have been forgotten.
I have tried to float the word "culturist" as a descriptor for this viewpoint. I haven't had much success
there, but I keep trying, and
shall use the words "culturist" and "culturism" in what follows.

Those of you who like to trace things back through the history of philosophy will recognize culturism as an
extreme form of
existentialism. In philosophical jargon your essence
is what you are, as
it might be put on a police WANTED poster: white male, 190 lbs, married two children, etc. Your existence is
that you are — the
fact of your being in the world. The old philosophical conundrum is: Which comes first, essence or existence?
Do you come into the world
with preset atrributes — the essentialist position? Or do you come in as a blank slate, and have to get
some attributes for yourself, as
the mid-20th-century Existentialists argued, or have them
imposed on you by your social
conditions, modes of production, and so on, as classical Marxism argued?

Our current state dogma is an extreme existentialist one. This can be seen all over the place. Charles Murray,
who is here among us today,
brought out a book on education this summer. The New York Times sent an reporter to interview him about it.
Here is a snippet from that
interview, as reported in the Times. The interviewer was a lady named Deborah Solomon, so I'll tag the
speakers as "Deborah" and
"Charles."

Deborah: Europeans have historically defined themselves through inherited traits and
titles, but isn't America a
country where we are supposed to define ourselves through acts of will?

Charles: I wonder if there is a single, solitary, real-live public-school teacher who agrees with
the proposition that it's all a
matter of will. To me, the fact that ability varies — and varies in ways that are impossible to
change — is a fact that we
learn in first grade.

Deborah: I believe that given the opportunity, most people could do most anything.

Charles: You're out of touch with reality in that regard.

Now, I would guess that most of the people present in this room would agree with Charles: Ms. Solomon has
lost contact with reality.
Yet her opinion on this — that "given the opportunity, most people could do most
anything" — is official dogma. She
is merely saying what everyone around her, all through her life, has been whispering in her ear: in a nutshell,
that there is no such thing as
human nature; in philosophical terms, that existence is anterior to essence.

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"Dogma" is by no means too strong a word for the socio-political status of this belief. It is
enforced with great ferocity. Harvard
President Larry Summers found this out in January 2005, when he suggested to an academic gathering that the paucity of
women in high-end science and
engineering positions might have non-culturist causes. There was a terrific fuss, a vote of no confidence in Summers
by the university's Faculty of
Arts and Sciences, and Summers eventually resigned.

James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA's structure, learned the same sharp lesson two years later when a British
newspaper quoted him as saying
he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on
the fact that their
intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really." That is indeed what the
testing says; but to voice the
fact out loud is a gross violation of culturist protocols. Watson, like Summers, had to perform a full medieval-style
recantation. If Africa isn't
doing well, that can only be because the infinitely plastic minds and personalities of Africans have not been acted on
by the right forces. They
have been acted on by wrong forces: colonialism, imperialism, racism, and so on.

At a somewhat lower level, there is a great hunger for books about human nature that reinforce the state
dogma — the dogma I
call "culturism." Jared Diamond has made a nice bundle for himself with
books
explaining human differences
without breathing a word about human biology. Plenty of lesser lights have done the same. I picked up Harvard
psychologist Richard Nisbett's book
The
Geography of Thought with great expectations, but I found that the book was weakened by its punctilious
culturism.

If, on the other hand, you publish a book that contradicts the "culturist" dogma, you had
better get the wife and kids
filling sandbags, beause you are going to take a lot of fire from the intellectual establishment. You could ask
Charles Murray about this.

Geography is in fact a great friend to the culturists.

Question: Why is this human group over here different from that one over there?

Answer: Ah, because they're different places, you see. Different fauna, different climate, so the
inhabitants react
differently.

Question: I see. But then, over a few hundred generations, wouldn't the selection pressures from
these different environments
cause these two populations to diverge in average characteristics, as Darwin observed with lesser animals?

Answer: Guards! Guards!

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It's a bit odd that this "culturist" dogma should prevail here in the United States, the homeland of
modern capitalism, for
"culturism" shares many of its roots with Marxism. The great biologist E.O. Wilson pointed this out in his
1978 book titled
On
Human
Nature. Wilson is best known for his advocacy of sociobiology — the project to find biological
explanations for human behavior,
including human social behavior. Well, here's what he says:

Marxism is sociobiology without biology. The strongest opposition to the scientific study of human
nature has come from a small
number of Marxist biologists and anthropologists who are committed to the view that human behavior arises from a very
few unstructured drives. They
believe that nothing exists in the untrained human mind that cannot be readily channeled to the purposes of the
revolutionary socialist state. When
faced with the evidence of greater structure, their response has been to declare human nature off limits to further
scientific investigation. A few
otherwise very able scholars have gone so far as to suggest that merely to talk about the subject is
dangerous.

Key figures in the establishment of the 20th century's great Marxist despotisms were all adherents of a
culturist view like the
one I have sketched. Mao Tse-tung, for example, wrote the following thing in 1958 with the Chinese "masses"
in mind: "On a blank
sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written." Mao then put his
Thought into action by launching
the Great Leap Forward. Like all "culturist" projects, the Leap ended in tears. China's industrial
development was set back a decade and
some 30 million Chinese people starved to death. In its extreme forms, "culturism" can be hazardous to your
health.

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So what is this peculiar doctrine — such a perfect fit for a revolutionary world-transforming
ideology like classical
Marxism — what is it doing as the state religion of a capitalist republic? I don't know the answer, though
I have pondered the question
long and hard.

Is it just the promise of human equality there in the Declaration of Independence — the founding
assertion that "All men are
created equal"? Hardly. It is plain if you delve into the minds and writings of the Founders that none of them
believed the thing Deborah
Solomon believes in that exchange with Charles Murray I replayed up above. The common 18th-century opinion was that
while education and moral
instruction might improve a person, there were incorrigible innate differences between persons. Everyone of that
period believed, for example, that
some of us are just "bad in the bone." At any rate, if they did not believe that, it is hard to understand
why their system of criminal
justice and punishment was as it was.

And if our forefathers did not believe in individual equality of ability — of "parts," as
they would have
said — neither did they believe in the equality of different races. Or if they did believe it, it is hard
to explain their
deep pessimism that black and white could live together in harmony, a pessimism shared by, for example, Abraham Lincoln
and Theodore Roosevelt.

The Founders' assertion of equality was in fact only a statement of intent that no system of hereditary ranks or
privilege should take root
on American soil, no formal aristocracy. They were in fact what we should nowadays call meritocrats. They did not
believe that Joe and Steve,
plucked at random from the population, possessed equal abilities, nor even the potential of acquiring equal abilities
if raised up properly from
birth. They only believed that if Joe and Steve were of equal ability, then neither of them should be held
back behind the other by any
disadvantage of birth or station.

All right: If this passion for the psychic unity of mankind does not spring from our founding ideals, why
is it so dominant, and policed
with such ferocity? Is it something to do with our being a multiracial society? Well, possibly, but the chain of
cause and effect is not clear to
me. The "culturist" dogma is held just as strongly in places like Scandinavia, which until recently were
perfectly monoracial. If you
were to write up a complete history of the culturist paradigm, you would need to give a prominent place to, for example,
Gunnar Myrdal, the mid-twentieth-century Swedish economist and
social scientist, who wrote a
key book about America's race problem, and was a signatory to the 1950 United Nations declaration The Race
Question, a founding document of
culturism. It's all a bit of a mystery to me.

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The culturist dogma is in any case false. We knew this a priori, once 19th-century biologists had
established the basic principles
of evolution. If you take some population of a uniform species, divide it in two, and arrange matters so that the two
sub-populations don't
interbreed — for example by putting one sub-population over here and the other one far away over
there — and
if you then run the clock for a few hundred generations, the two populations will diverge. That's biology 101. If you
run the clock for tens of
thousands of generations, the two groups will diverge so far, they won't be able to interbreed — and
that is the origin of species!
This is basic a priori stuff. It's why there are different breeds of dogs. It's why a room full of
Australian Aborigines looks nothing
like a room full of Hungarians.

The last line of defense for culturists is — or would be, if you could ever get them to engage in a
conversation about
biology — that the observable divergences among human groups are only in superficial qualities. Australian
aborigines and Hungarians
simply haven't been separated for long enough to develop non-superficial differences. Your two roomfuls may not
look like each other, but
their thoughts, behavior, and social arrangements might be anything at all; and any behaviors or arrangements the one
population might have, the
other might equally well have, if appropriately trained.

This was never very plausible, and comparative analysis of the human genome proves it false. Our behavior,
including our social behavior,
issues from the brain; and the brain is an organ, like the liver or lungs. Populations who live at great heights for
many generations —
in
Tibet or the Andes — develop lungs that can cope. In just the same way, a people who made the change from a
hunter-gatherer lifestyle to
a pastoral or field-agriculture lifestyle, will gradually change their personalities and ways of thinking to adapt to
their new social
circumstances — the higher population densities, more demanding work schedules, and more complicated social
arrangements.

(After I had written about this on the internet one time, I had an email from a lady dog breeder, who said:
"Duh. If I couldn't breed
for personality, I'd be out of business." Dog breeds are not "socially constructed." The great
example here is the Russian
breeder Dmitri Belyaev, who succeeded in developing a tame, domesticated breed of fox in only forty years.)

Not only is the culturist dogma false, it is also poisonous and divisive. Think of the racial composition of
our prisons. According to the
Department of Justice website, one in every 22 adult black males in the U.S.A. was
in state
or federal prison in June 2007. For Hispanic Americans, it was one in 57; for whites, one in 130. And think of
those recurring newspaper
stories about black and Hispanic test-takers failing to get jobs or promotion in the police or fire services, and black
and Hispanic kids defying
every effort to get their school test scores up to white and Asian averages, even in prosperous middle-class areas.
What's going on?

A culturist explanation would be that blacks and Hispanics are held back by "racism" —
basically, by malice on the part
of white and Asian people.

A non-culturist explanation would be that a population whose ancestors went through some key
transisiton — say, from
hunting-gathering to pastoralism — ten thousand years ago, if compared with a population whose ancestors
passed through that transition
only one thousand years ago, will have, on average of course, different gene sets conferring different abilities,
personalities, and social skills.
Natural selection can just get more done in ten thousand years than in one thousand. This is not scientifically
controversial.

Now consider the effect on a black or Hispanic person of the two explanations. If he accepts the first, the
culturist explanation, he will
be mad as hell, and rightly so. He looks out at the world and sees people like himself stuck at the bottom of society.
Why? Because of malice on
the part of other groups. That's what the culturist model tells him. He's just the same as those other
groups — the differences are
only superficial. Why isn't his group doing as well as their groups? Malice, the culturists tell him, wicked malice!
Why wouldn't he be
mad as hell?

If, on the other hand, he accepts the biological explanation, there is no-one to blame. That's just how human
biology has shaken out across
the deep history of our species. It isn't anybody's fault.

Thus, a culturist explanation of human group inequality — or of human individual inequality, for that
matter — breeds
rage and rancor. The true, biological explanation, by contrast, offers at least the hope of acceptance. We do, after
all, accept our
individual differences without pain. Everybody in this room is better than I am at something or other:
playing tennis, appreciating
music, writing, attracting the opposite sex. Many of you are undoubtedly smarter than I am. I don't lose any sleep
over this. Millions of American
men and women go out and play golf every weekend, by no means sunk in listless despair at the knowledge that they will
never be as good as Tiger
Woods. If we
can so placidly accept individual inequality, why can't we accept group inequality — especially since it is
supported by an ever-growing
mountain of evidence? Perhaps we like rage and rancor, I don't know.

—————————

Well, back to Cochran and Harpending, and this latest volume of "biohistory." The authors take us
through a number of great
changes in the lives of human groups, through history and prehistory. There was the encounter with Neanderthals, and
the tricky question of whether
there was some interbreeding. Then there was the really big one, the hydrogen bomb of human evolutionary change:
the transition from a
hunter-gatherer lifestyle to pastoralism and settled farming — "horn and corn" cultivation. Then
there is a chapter on
Ashkenazi intelligence, which these authors, and a couple of others, published a much-discussed paper on a couple of
years ago.

The evidence is plain, and our ongoing investigation of the human genome confirms it: our evolution did not
stop dead fifty thousand years
ago. The "psychic unity of mankind" is a myth. The big old paleolithic populations of humanity
differ — slightly, and of
course statistically, but incontrovertibly. The evidence is right there in the genome; and we could anyway deduce it
a priori from the
known laws of biology. Now all we have to do is convert our nation's cultural, political, and intellectual elites to
these true facts.

I'm going to start up a new space on my bookshelves for this new discipline of biohistory. My guess is, though,
that there'll be a couple of
dozen books in that space before I next hear the president of any Ivy League college, or the director of any
prestigious genetics lab —
let alone any politician or op-ed commentator! — speak out clearly and unapologetically against the
poisonous, divisive, and
false culturist myth.